Ransomware Attacks: Prevention and Mitigation

A successful ransomware attack can have various impacts on a business. Some of the most common risks include: - Ransomware attacks are designed to force their victims to pay a ransom. Additionally, companies can lose money due to the costs of remediating the infection, lost business, and...

A successful ransomware attack can have various impacts on a business. Some of the most common risks include: - Ransomware attacks are designed to force their victims to pay a ransom. Additionally, companies can lose money due to the costs of remediating the infection, lost business, and potential legal fees. - Some ransomware attacks encrypt data as part of their extortion efforts. Often, this can result in data loss, even if the company pays the ransom and receives a decryptor. - Ransomware groups are increasingly pivoting to double or triple extortion attacks. These attacks incorporate data theft and potential exposure alongside data encryption. - Ransomware attacks can harm an organization's reputation with customers and partners. This is especially true if customer data is breached or they receive ransom demands as well. - Ransomware attacks may be enabled by security negligence and may include the breach of sensitive data. This may open up a company to lawsuits or penalties being levied by regulators. Taking the following best practices can reduce an organization's exposure to ransomware and minimize its impacts: **Cyber Awareness Training and Education:** Ransomware is often spread using phishing emails. Training users on how to identify and avoid potential ransomware attacks is crucial. As many of the current cyber-attacks start with a targeted email that does not even contain malware, but only a socially-engineered message that encourages the user to click on a malicious link, user education is often considered as one of the most important defenses an organization can deploy. **Continuous data backups: ** Ransomware's definition says that it is malware designed to make it so that paying a ransom is the only way to restore access to the encrypted data. Automated, protected data backups enable an organization to recover from an attack with a minimum of data loss and without paying a ransom. Maintaining regular backups of data as a routine process is a very important practice to prevent losing data, and to be able to recover it in the event of corruption or disk hardware malfunction. Functional backups can also help organizations to recover from ransomware attacks. **Patching:** Patching is a critical component in defending against ransomware attacks as cyber-criminals will often look for the latest uncovered exploits in the patches made available and then target systems that are not yet patched. As such, it is critical that organizations ensure that all systems have the latest patches applied to them, as this reduces the number of potential vulnerabilities within the business for an attacker to exploit. **User Authentication: **Accessing services like RDP with stolen user credentials is a favourite technique of ransomware attackers. The use of strong user authentication can make it harder for an attacker to make use of a guessed or stolen password.